Freespace the Forgotten Classic [Part 1]- An Introduction to Freespace (and me)
Note: I originally wrote this as a script for a video (found here) and have made a few edits to the original draft.
Why? That’s the question that always comes to mind when I deal with Freespace. Why have I been playing this game for almost a decade and a half? Why is that first playthrough still so fresh in my mind? Why do so few people talk about it even when it routinely appears on the lists of the greatest games of all time? Why indeed.
Freespace the Great War was the second game I ever bought (Freespace 2 was the third) and here I am still playing it and watching as its successes in gameplay and narrative are ignored year after year. I routinely find myself comparing games with more elaborately told stories to the series and I’m often met with some amount of disappointment be it in the execution or idea. That isn’t to say Freespace is flawless. It’s a game from a bygone era of joysticks and multitudes of keyboard controls, many of which it won’t tell you about without you having to open the full command list. This, admittedly, makes the game a bit unapproachable by modern standards. Even with its cut and dry tutorials, Freespace is a game that respects you enough to not creepily hold your hand as you play and demands your full attention to appreciate its goals. Freespace is a game you can comfortably ignore the story to or write a thesis on how it’s a retelling of Exodus (link to Luis Dias’s post here).
Freespace wasn’t close to being the first space combat sim but it’s widely regarded as the cream of the crop even though its core formula is steeped heavily in Wing Commander and X-Wing. Its main contribution to the genre that it became the bookend of was incorporating capital ships directly into combat in a move to make battles feel more real and intense. The other, arguably more important, reason for Freespace’s dedicated community is its impressively told story.
In spite of the word count and overall lack of production value seen in the first game it managed to spin a tale of survival and horror into a piece of well thought out, if a little barebones, military science fiction. Wrap this around some genuinely frightening answers as to what’s waiting for us in the void and endings that briefly conclude the experience with meditations on human nature and you wind up with something timeless and constantly applicable.
That said, Freespace is very much a product of its time and while it did push its genre forward, Freespace 2 wasn’t enough to save it as joysticks went out of favor at the turn of the millennium. Even with its cult following of obsessive people like me, Freespace never received much more than lip service as the years have gone on and with this project, I’m hoping to change that a little. The series deserves to be discussed and analyzed along with other classics for what it accomplished in the late 90s. Some of my love for it is creepy and obsessive but that alone wouldn’t be enough to keep my playing and extolling its virtues for as long as I have.
Some of it’s down to how I play games. If I find something I adore, then it’s going to be played until every ounce of enjoyment has been squeezed out of it and then some. I’ll rarely permanently put down any of the games that have been, and especially the ones still, on my all time favorites list. If there’s any value left, either in the beauty of the design, the challenge, or the story, I’ll be playing it long after I should’ve exhausted the content.
When I say I’ve been playing Freespace for about fifteen years, I mean the 5–8 hour retail campaigns. I’ve played a fair number of the community campaigns that, at this point, have far surpassed the originals on technical levels alone. They’re impressive and have often been some of the best pieces of science fiction and horror in games I’ve come across (here’s to you Goober, Darius and the Blue Planet team, Axem, Ransom, and Hard Light Productions as a whole). Yet here I am always starting back with the two retail campaigns.
There’s beauty in the simplicity and dispassion in the world of retail Freespace. It’s as much a survival horror game as it is a space combat sim. At a system level this probably doesn’t make a ton of sense. Flying a little ship blowing up bigger ones all sounds like a power fantasy set of mechanics but that’s only half of the game. Freespace’s power and longevity come from its framing. No matter how many Shivans you kill, it’s not going to matter. More will come and more will die. That’s the game’s horror, your own powerlessness in spite of doing everything perfectly. The damage you inflict on your enemy won’t hinder them until they’re on your doorstep and you have to gamble everything on one last, desperate operation. And even then, it’ll be a pyrrhic victory.
I’m not going to delve too deeply into Freespace’s world in an introduction but as with most science fiction, it asks some difficult questions; some building off of the question of “what if we’re not alone” and others about the nature of history and what we leave behind. The way to stave off destruction in Freespace is to read history and pay attention to the quiet little cutscenes discussing a long dead civilization’s failings. Even then it’s not enough to prevent complete disaster. Both the Terrans and Vasudans lose their homeworlds by the end of the first game and are left to pick up the pieces of civilization.
Freespace 2 takes on the space politics of reconstruction with a deftness not often found outside of novels. The Terrans are the ones struggling to rebuild. Though the Terrans and Vasudans are supposed equals in their newly reconstructed government, the animosity of a meaningless 14 year long war still holds strong, even thirty years later. Humanity’s resentment towards their ally’s success germinates into a rebellion, led by someone all too aware of where they’ll wind up in the history books and privately admitting he’s using the pent up animosity for his own ends. Unlike nearly every sci-fi game I’ve played, especially action centric ones, the animosity and eventual rebellion is both understandable and tragic. The rebels are being used and it’s calling into question humanity’s commitment to their alliance and allowing old wounds to fester. Even the epic sci-fi RPGs I’ve played rarely paint a rebellion in such a way, particularly when you’re the one helping to snuff it out. Yet here’s a game from 1999 that executed on the complex nature of governing through the aftermath of a conflict.
In another show of craftsmanship, Freespace 2 manages to make the Shivans even more of a threat in spite of their defeat at the end of the first game. Again, their motives are a mystery and this time every apparent victory is only a foreshadowing of what new horrors are to come. This is a Lovecraftian monster in fine form, the more you think you know about it, the more uneasy you become and your own smallness inches closer into view. The back of the box actually offers a vague callback to the first game and foreshadows the upcoming nightmare: “Your nemesis has arrived…and they’re wondering what happened to their scouting party.” While it’s unclear if this is a reference to the first game, even the idea that your enemy from back then was easy is chilling. Keeping a familiar foe genuinely frightening is something most pure horror experiences have difficulty with and such an achievement deserves discussion.
But back to the question of why are these two games relevant? Because there’s nothing else like them. Yes there are other space combat games and there are other games that do Lovecraftian horror well (i.e. Bloodborne) but there are so few games that are able to reframe mechanics and systems to the point that I’m comfortable saying systems themselves do not a genre make (even if that’s how most genres are defined right now). It’s rare to find science fiction in games willing to play politics in subtle ways. It’s even rarer to find game science fiction where humans aren’t special and have to grapple with that fact. Combine all these story elements with gameplay that has barely been used since 1999 and the two Freespace games are true classics, occupying their own little world that has long been ignored.
Freespace as a story remains unfinished to this day and likely remain that way indefinitely. In many ways, this has been its greatest asset. The community surrounding the game has added to and speculated on the story and gameplay for about as long as I’ve been playing the game. They’ve used the unfinished story for some amazing science fiction and truly unique experiences that you can’t find anywhere else. So with all this, the question really becomes, why haven’t we been talking more about these two games?
Sadly it’s down to the release timing and Interplay not helping matters. I already said Freespace 2 came at the end of the joystick being a necessary peripheral for a gaming PC. On top of that there was little marketing behind the game and while it wasn’t a financial failure, it didn’t sell well. To top off a poor launch, Half-Life had come out the year before (the same year as Descent: Freespace the Great War by the way) and that’s all anyone wanted to pay attention to.
This project grew out of my repeated failings to make a single comprehensive look at Freespace and my needing to take a step back. Instead I’m making this introduction the beginning to a series of more detailed reads, focusing on specific parts of Freespace. I honestly can’t believe it took me this long to start this project and I’m hoping at least a few of you will find it interesting. Please stick around and join me as I codify my roughly fifteen years spent with the series.
